Russian Spring (45 page)

Telegraph Avenue petered out rather abruptly into another area of tree-shrouded residential streets, the private houses old and crumbly looking, the low apartment complexes gone somewhat to seed, and only then did Bobby find his voice again.

“Where to now?” he asked Eileen. “Your place?”

“
My
place? I live in the
dorms
, you can’t stay with me.”

“But I thought—”

“Come
on
, Bobby, I mean I just picked you up in Dirty Death a few days ago. I mean I like you, and we can
date
and all, but it’s not like you’re my instant
boyfriend
or something. I mean I see lots of guys here, I don’t want to, you know,
tie
myself up with a live-in regular, even if I could. . . .”

She gave him an all-too-knowing look. “Besides,” she said, “from the way your
tongue
was hanging out on Telegraph Avenue, you don’t either, now do you?”

Bobby had to laugh. “Ya got me,” he was forced to admit. “But . . . what am I going to do? I really don’t have that much money, and I don’t know anyone here but you.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Eileen told him. “I think I know a place you can crash real cheap, that’s where we’re going now, Little Moscow.”

“Little Moscow?”

Eileen laughed. “That’s what the
Gringos
call it, anyway,” she said. “The people who live there don’t call it
anything
. Except maybe
Nat’s place, when they want to tell someone where the party is. You’re gonna love it, Bobby. And they’re gonna love
you
.”

Eileen parked the car in front of a ratty-looking old three-story wood-frame house on a somewhat disreputable-looking side street full of similar houses, with overgrown lawns, unkempt shrubbery, peeling paint, rickety porches and front stairs.

The front door was open, and she led him straight inside without knocking, into a long hallway, past the doorless entrance to a big living room full of musty-looking old furniture, where half a dozen people were sitting around in front of a videowall, past a toilet from which he heard the sound of flushing, and into a big untidy kitchen.

There was a stove, a microwave oven, two old refrigerators, a big restaurant double sink piled high with dirty dishes and grimy pots, and a big redwood picnic table with two long backless redwood benches. A blond girl in a dirty white T-shirt and cut-off jeans was stirring a huge steaming kettle with a big wooden spoon. A guy with long black hair was ripping up salad greens at the redwood table and tossing them into a large old wooden bowl.

“Hi!” Eileen said brightly. “Where’s Nat?”

“In his room marking papers,” the mec said, without looking up from his kitchen chores.

Eileen led Bobby out of the kitchen back into the hallway, then up two flights of stairs to another hall that led past a series of doors, some of them open, revealing small bedrooms with people reading, or working at computer consoles, others closed, including the one at the far end of the hall, with a crudely drawn poster tacked to it. The poster showed a hand holding five playing cards, a royal flush, and in spades.

“Knock-knock!” Eileen yelled, banging on the door.

“Who’s there?” said a man’s voice from the other side.

“Uh . . . José. . . .”

“José who?”

“José can you see by the dawn’s early light . . .”

A moment later, the door opened. The man who stood in the doorway looked to be about thirty, with thick curly black hair, a big, slightly hooked nose, wide lips, and dark brown eyes under heavy brows, eyes that seemed to flash and sparkle with some secret and highly amusing knowledge. He wore old black jeans, and a red-and-black lumberjack shirt bulging slightly over the hint of a paunch, sleeves rolled up past the elbows.

“You are . . . ?” he said in a rather rough voice. “You know what a putz I am with names, if you know me at all.”

“
Eileen Sparrow
, Nat,” Eileen said in some exasperation.

“This is?” Nat said, nodding toward Bobby.

“Bobby Reed. All the way from Paris.”

Nat’s eyebrows arched upward. “You want?”

“A place for Bobby to crash.”

“You can pay?”

Bobby shrugged. “I’ve got
some
money,” he said.

“What can you afford?”

Bobby thought about it. “Not much,” he said, rather shamefacedly. “Three hundred a night?”

“Too much. Deuce, if I say okay.”

“Great!” Bobby exclaimed in surprise.

“Not so fast. You willing to do your share of chores?”

“Sure.”

“You really a Frenchman?”

“Not exactly. I mean, I was born in Paris, but my father is an American, and I’m thinking about going to college here, and—”

“You play poker?”

“Huh?”

“I asked you if you played poker, kid. Seven- or five-card stud. Jacks or better. Straight draw. None of this wild-card bullshit.”

“Well . . . uh, no, not really, I mean I know the rules, but . . . ,” Bobby muttered in something of a daze.

“You willing to learn?”

“Well, yeah, sure, why not?”

Nat gave a positively manic cackle, rubbing his big thick hands together. “Now
that’s
what I like to hear!” he said. “First lesson after dinner. Spaghetti with meat sauce, or so they tell me, but what kind of meat, better you don’t ask. Gotta get back to marking this shit now. What a bunch of assholes! About all these kids know about history is that Columbus seduced the Virgin Islands, and Ronnie Reagan had an extra prick under his armpit that he used on Congress. Well, what the fuck, half right ain’t so bad!”

And he closed the door behind him.

“That’s
it?
” Bobby stammered.

“That’s
Nat Wolfowitz!
” Eileen told him, rolling her eyes toward the ceiling.

There were ten people at dinner that night, plus Bobby and Eileen, and over salad, served first in the American manner, spaghetti in rather watery meat sauce, and plenty of rough red California wine that presumed to call itself Burgundy, Bobby learned all about “Little Moscow.”

“Why do they call this house ‘Little Moscow’?” he asked ingenuously
as the spaghetti was being served. “You people aren’t really Communists, are you?”

There was a moment of dead silence along the big picnic table. A big black girl named Marla Washington gave him a rather hostile look. “What are
you
, some kind of gringo jingo?” she snapped. “You think we’ve got something
catching?
”

“Hey,” Bobby shot back on instant impulse, “some of my best friends are Communists.”

“Very funny,” said Jack Genovese, who had made the salad.

“No, really . . . ,” Bobby said. He paused. Well, what the hell, if he was really going to live here, these people were going to find out all about him sooner or later anyway. “My mother’s a Party member, and my sister is gonna end up with a Party card too, I guess. . . .”

“You serious, kid?” Nat Wolfowitz said. “I thought the last American Communist went out with the dodo.”

“My mother’s a
Russian
.”

“A
Russian?
”

“I thought you were some kind of Frenchman,” Wolfowitz said.

“Well, I was born in Paris, but my mother is a Soviet national, and my dad still has American citizenship, even though they lifted his passport, and . . .” Bobby threw up his hands. “It’s kind of complicated,” he said.

“Do tell,” said Nat Wolfowitz. Eileen eyed him a bit peculiarly, suddenly reminding Bobby that he hadn’t exactly told her all of this stuff. The rest of them studied him quite intently, though without apparent hostility, as if he were some kind of exotic creature suddenly dropped down from a flying saucer into their midst. Which, from their point of view, he realized, he was.

So, over spaghetti and a couple of glasses of bad red wine, Bobby told his life story, such as it was, and as he did, a strange thing began to happen.

He was one of the youngest people at the table, and he hadn’t been in the house for much more than three hours, but here he was, holding the attention of all these college students; even Nat Wolfowitz, who was some kind of assistant professor or something, listened raptly, with a kind of respect, even. What was more, by the time he had finished, they were smiling at him, dishing him out more spaghetti, refilling his glass, making him feel more welcome, somehow, than he had ever felt anywhere before any time in his life.

“And so now here I am,” he finally said. “
Now
will you guys tell me why they call this place ‘Little Moscow’?”

“Because we’re all
Reds!
” exclaimed Cindy Feinstein the spaghetti maker, and everyone but Eileen broke up into raucous laughter.

“Then you
are
Communists?”

More laughter.

“Explain it to him, Nat,” said Karl Horvath, a pudgy kid in a Donald Duck T-shirt. Wolfowitz poured himself another drink, leaned forward on his elbows, and rattled it off in rapid fire.

“Berkeley, like Gaul, as in Charles de, is divided into two parts. Party of the first being the Gringos, who you may have noticed, clean-cut all-American boys and girls, techheads for the most part, noses to the grindstone, eye on the main chance, namely a good job in biotech or better yet the defense industry, jingo assholes who study hard, give boring parties, blot themselves on beer . . .”

“Boo! Hiss!”

“Balls to the wall!”

“Party of the second part being weirdos like us, who have no ambition to cog into the Big Green Machine, major in economically pointless shit like history and literature, are less than entranced with Festung Amerika, Pigs in Space, and our snatches and grabs in Latin America, and are not entirely convinced that the Peens are a treacherous gang of frog-eating faggots—”

“Real party animals!”

“Complete garbageheads!”

“Know how to wail!”

“Which, from the Gringo point of view, makes us all a bunch of un-American Peen-loving Commie degenerates who oughta be tarred and feathered and ridden out of the country on a rail, especially since we don’t let
them
come to
our
parties. . . .”

“Hence, Reds!”

“Hence, Little Moscow, hotbed thereof!”

“Je comprends,” Bobby muttered.

“Oooh,
French!
” Cindy moaned in good-natured mock admiration. “Très chic!”

Bobby laughed. A warm glow of contentment suffused his body, and not just from the wine and the heavy meal. For the first time in his life, he felt that he had found a group of people roughly his own age who truly accepted him for what he was, for
all
that he was, the first really like-minded people he had ever met, Americans in a kind of exile themselves, just like him, people whom he sensed could become a real circle of true friends.

How unexpected, and how sweet it was, that he had found them here, in the United States.

After dinner was over, Bobby learned the rules of the house. There were fourteen people currently in residence, meaning that he was responsible for the communal dinner one night in fourteen. One day
in fourteen, he had to clean the living room and the halls. One day in fourteen, he had to do the bathrooms. And one day in fourteen, he had to do the dinner dishes, and since he was the new boy in the house, he might as well get started now. After he was through, he could join the poker game.

It seemed like a fair and not very onerous arrangement, and so Bobby took Eileen’s phone number, promised to call, kissed her good-bye, and got down to doing the dishes that people had stacked in the sink, another house rule.

Bobby had never faced such a stack of dishes and pots in his life, indeed since he had grown up with a dishwasher in the kitchen, he had scarcely faced any dishes at all, but he set to work with a will, it really wasn’t so bad, and after less than an hour, he had everything stacked in the drying rack—don’t bother to dry anything was, fortunately, another house rule—and he was ready to join the poker game.

Wolfowitz, Marla, Jack, Barry Lee, a thin gangly Oriental with his hair done up in a red Mohawk, and Ellis Burton, duded out in asymmetrical painted jeans and a leather vest, were already playing around a big round table in the living room, and since another of the rules was that Nat would not play poker with less than three or more than five hands, Bobby was told that he would have to kibitz until someone dropped out or was cleaned out.

“Don’t worry, kid,” Wolfowitz told him, “with these marks, that won’t take long.”

Bobby knew the basic rules of poker, but he had played very little; nevertheless, it didn’t take him long to see what Nat Wolfowitz meant.

It was a low-stakes game with a ten-dollar-bet limit, and one of the other rules was that you had to leave when you lost two hundred bucks. “I only play with these rubes for practice,” Wolfowitz declared with an evil leer as he shuffled the cards. “From each according to their ability, which around here ain’t Jack shit, to me according to my greed, which approaches infinity as a limit, but I don’t take serious money from my friends, I save that for the Fat Men.”

The game was dealer’s choice, but only straight draw, five- or seven-card stud, and jacks or better were allowed, and Wolfowitz always opted for seven-card when he had the deck.

“Poker, like life, is at least as much luck as skill,” he informed Bobby, “but seven-card stud gives skill more room to operate. It’s what separates the men from the boys and the boys from their bucks.”

But if poker was really half luck, then why did the bills pile up so consistently in front of Nat Wolfowitz? He seemed to win about every other hand of seven-card stud, often with mediocre cards, and when he won, he won big. If someone else opened up a game of jacks or
better, he dropped out immediately unless it turned out later that he had been holding three of a kind or higher. At straight draw, he either took two cards or less, or folded. At five-card stud, he seemed to follow no pattern that Bobby could discern.

It didn’t take much more than an hour for Marla Washington to lose two hundred dollars and leave the game.

“Lesson number one,” Wolfowitz said as Bobby took her place at the table. “The secret of winning at poker is to avoid losing.”